Hubot

I went to an awesome conference recently called the Joy of Coding, where we celebrate how fun coding actually is. They talked about joy of testing, code as art. But there was one guy that inspired me the most, Ben Straub.

Ben told us first how important a chat client is within a company. I’ve seen it at Defacto where Hipchat boosted communication enormously. At my new job at Hoppinger they went from Google hangouts to Slack and the communication more than doubled. Granted there’s some noise too, but you can easily tune it out.

I love chatprograms like hipchat and slack. I also love robots. Turns out, there’s a robot for your chatprograms. Ben told us about Hubot and how you can automate everything, from deployment to weather updates. And all from within your chatprogram.

At his company though they wanted a way to thank people, to be able to send a virtual high five and reward the person with something. So they used Hubot for that. They wrote a script that sends a random GIF and buys a giftcard automatically.

Now at Hoppinger I wanted this too. The giftcard thing was still a little far fetched, need some approval for this. But, like Ben said, you don’t need anyone’s permission to set up Hubot or write an awesome script for it. So i did some looking around and found three scripts that resembled my wishes. I wanted the awesome GIF, but I also wanted a sentence in which the user is made to feel awesome.

I set out to combine the three scripts and add a little flavour of my own. So the script now sends a random highfive GIF, a random praise sentence and it also saves the praise in the Hubot brain, so later you can ask Hubot who praised who!

For more information I’d suggest you look at http://marthyn.github.io/hubot-praise

Motivating and thanking your employees or coworkers should happen more often and this makes it super easy, therefor it happens more often.